How Fresh is Fresh Orange Juice?

?Most everyone knows that orange juice is good for you. Nearly every child in the United States grew up being told that oranges, and particularly orange juice, was full of vitamin C and was as healthy as a glass of liquid sunshine. However, there was a time when that familiar and refreshing pasteurized orange juice sold in convenient chilled cartons was not always so readily available in this country. It wasn’t until the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) began regulating and standardizing orange juice back in the early 1960’s that all of the orange juice in the United States began to look and taste basically similar.
 
One of the results of that process of standardization included an almost uniform claim of freshness throughout the orange juice manufacturing industry. Despite the claims of freshness, most consumers today are surprised when they find out that most orange juice sold in the U.S. today is really not as fresh or natural as they might imagine.
 
Many people are ware that much of the orange juice sold today is made with reconstituted orange concentrate in a process where water is added back into the mix to make it “fresh.” The concentrates utilize basic orange flavors that come from various orange oils and orange essences that the juice manufacturers collect and sell to specialized flavor manufacturers who then reconstitute those orange by-products into standard flavor mixes that are mixed back into the concentrate with water to make orange juice.
 
However, something most people do not know is that most of the “fresh” raw orange juice that does not employ concentrates is actually a mix of different orange components too. Those components are usually heated to separate out the volatile compounds and flavor-rich oils, and then they are stored for about a year before being sold to consumers.

This means your tall glass of fresh orange juice may not actually be quite as fresh and natural as the label might indicate it is. In fact, most orange juice labels are not required to disclose the fact that many of the orange by-products and flavor concentrates used today in the U.S actually come from other countries like China and Argentina. Because those nations do not have the same food processing regulations that the FDA employs in the U.S., many of them can contain unknown pesticides and fertilizer residues, a fact that the producers and packagers here in the U.S. do not have to disclose.
 
In a nutshell, this is why orange juice tastes better when you squeeze your own fresh oranges to make your own fresh orange juice. Some in the juice industry point out that the real facts of fresh orange juice production are not covered up by deceptive or misleading advertising, instead they say that overly simplistic messages from both our government and the food industry have contributed to a situation where most average consumers are woefully unaware of exactly where and how their food is actually produced. For the time being however, the labels on those orange juice containers in your refrigerator at home will continue to leave out the industrial processing details and instead simply point to its “freshness.”